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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

For me, the biggest problem with Twitter are their Draconian rules concerning third-party apps. I had several ideas for cool apps built on top of the Twitter API (e.g. a Twitter-based news aggregator, an online volunteering app, ...), but each time I gave up on the idea after reading the terms of their developer program:

No showing of tweets with content from other social networks, no altering in the presentation of tweets, very severe rate limits, ....

I think if Twitter wad a little less paranoid about protecting their content they could actually become a viable and useful communication tool for a large part of the Internet (even more than today).

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>No showing of tweets with content from other social networks

Where does it say that? I've been working with folks and using products that do exactly that and they haven't had issues. Yes you have to display it like Twitter wants, but I've not seen any limit to also showing FB or other content.

Have a look at their Content Display Requirements (especially the section on "timeline integrity")

https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/display-requirements

They mean you can't mix the timelines together into one timeline. That seems to make sense to me. If you have a twitter timeline (which is different than tweets being displayed), it can only be Twitter.

It doesn't make sense to me. I cannot have a inbox with Twitter and Instagram displayed. It limits the ability to do lifestream type apps.

Windows Phone has this feature built-in though. My Facebook and Twitter timelines are mixed in a single column. You could add LinkedIn too.

That only applies to showing a timeline. So you can't mix @user on Twitter with @user on Instagram in the same timeline. But if they aren't grouped, no problem. It also doesn't apply if there's human selection going on, a manual process. (Dunno if you can automate that with e.g. MT, heh.)

That seems reasonable. I don't like any of this social media stuff, but Twitter has the best APIs. Maybe because they sell access, so they want it to be a good product?

There are similar clauses in the requirements that apply to single tweets, and which e.g. prohibit the display of any social media buttons like "Like", "Share" etc. along a tweet, and that are pretty strict on the formatting of the tweet content itself.

But how exactly do they make money on developers using their API?

Charge for less rate limiting?

As the app grows the usage grows and twitter makes more money.

The way I see it, third party applications increase the value of using twitter, bringing more users to it. Twitter as a social sharing tool has very little value to me, personally, but as a chat tool, marketing tool, or customer support tool I think it has a lot of potential. Its presentation/UX is not very optimized for those experiences, though -- and that's why third party apps exist. If an open source project builds its chatroom on top of twitter, that's a huge value-add and would bring people to use twitter in order to efficiently communicate with the company, in the same way people use Slack because companies host their support on it.

By the way, I think their rate limiting is fine for most third party apps. There is a lot that can be done with intermediate caching and the Streaming API.

Brings value is not the same as brings money.

The same way everyone else does:

1) Ads via the in-line feeds [removing ads is a ToS violation, same way the real world ad networks now is basically a js/link configuration...can sell CPC this way]

2) Charge for API calls.

3) Charge for "premium membership" that unlocks the api at like $10/user/year

Who do you charge for the API calls?

Ideally the developer would be able to choose between paying themselves or letting users pay through micropayments.

With the amount of app piracy, this would make no sense, in my opinion. Developers would be actually robbed.

Aside from that, almost all apps are paid for once, not on a subscription basis.

Pretty sure your statement is a breakthrough.

I'd gladly pay for premium API access as a Twitter user which would then allow me to use third party apps.

2) Charge for API calls.

--- For in-house development and/or SaaS software that interfaces with Twitter. Even something like $.10 per 1,000 requests would add up pretty fast for large deployments.

Example? http://freshdesk.com/integrations/help-desk-ticketing-twitte...

These people could be milked by Twitter. Its a SaaS webapp so they can protect their API access.

3) Charge for "premium membership" that unlocks the api at like $10/user/year

--- app piracy isn't an issue if a user is paying to unlock the API for their account

Also, if app piracy is an issue because they can get ahold of your API keys, that just means you need to route it through your internal API and secure things properly. It isn't Twitters job to fix the fact you don't want to have any infrastructure.

Hell, is Twitter even turning a profit yet?

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